


Depravity in the Mystery Shack, Triumph Of

by voided



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Demons, Other, Possession, Siblings, Twins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-11 12:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4434950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voided/pseuds/voided
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's difficult times for the Pines twins. Stan and his twin keep fighting. The whole town is seeming to ignore the recent "earthquakes." Meeting the author is definitely not the profound and exciting experience that Dipper thought it would be. And who better to take advantage of this onslaught of despair than a demon?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Noise in the Pines Residence

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [YOU MISSED!](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/132674) by boomsheikas-art-blog. 



> First AO3 work! Thank you to Tumblr user boomsheikas-art-blog for making the wonderful (devastating) comic that inspired me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to Tumblr user boomsheikas-art-blog for the comic that inspired this!

When there is a death in Gravity Falls, there is a very short time in which nobody knows nothing at all about it. But before long, death, like any other secret in town, catches the wind and rustles the trees; the trees stoop their limbs and whisper it to the gnomes; the gnomes send their most agile to tell the minotaurs; the minotaurs bellow it to the valley, and soon everyone knows. Not the people, but the things that really count, the things that make it miserable to live in that godforsaken valley––every ghost, goblin and ghoul, every trickster, every shapeshifter, every hide-behind, demon and spirit, they all know about it sooner or later, and they get to work immediately. 

This time it didn’t even take that long. 

\-----

“Where did you find the floating eyeballs?”

Ford closed his eyes. Though he had a lot of love for this kid, he couldn't do it today. He just couldn't do it. 

“What about the crystals? How did you find out that they could shrink and enlarge things? What about the shapeshifter? Did you find it as a baby, an adolescent, or an adult? Or was it an egg? How can it have an original form if it’s a shapeshifter anyway?” Dipper paced, tapping his pencil against his lip. At this point he was really just thinking out loud, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want answers from his great uncle. 

“You’re so bright, Dipper. You can figure these things out. Why are you asking me?”

“I want to know. I want to know everything.” He flipped through Journal 1, eyeing all the new things he had just read about.. Last night he hadn’t slept at all because he was too impatient to read it in the morning. Mabel was at a sleepover so she couldn’t force him to go to sleep as usual, which he still hasn’t decided was a blessing or a curse. His acquaintance with the all-nighter had graduated to more of a close friendship in these past few hectic days and Mabel wasn’t happy about it at all. Now that he thought about it, she probably knew that he stayed up tonight. “I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why the monster was so angry all the time! It doesn’t have a set body.” He stopped pacing and looked down at his shoes over the book. “I feel like I’m taking my physical form for granted now. That’s a real thought.”

“Well, it was very rebellious in its adolescent years,” Ford laughed.

Dipper giggled nervously. “The shapeshifter?”

“Yes, the shapeshifter.”

“Well,” he giggled, “well, I guess if anything, it does have a killer body!”

Ford’s eyes shot up to Dipper’s. He opened and closed his mouth. “I -- oh,” he stammered, rising quickly from his armchair. Dipper flinched as he brushed past, and did not turn when he heard the click and slam of the screen door. 

For the first time since Dipper arrived in Gravity Falls, Oregon, he got a wrenching, stabbing anxiety in his abdomen whenever he uttered the sentence, “There is something wrong in Gravity Falls, Oregon.” The weight of all the mysteries he uncovered here finally crushed him yesterday when the portal spat out this new problem, the Lee-Ford problem that not only took a sledgehammer to everything he ever considered sacred, but then made him question why all of it was so precious to him in the first place. He looked down at the journal in his hands, and he became overly aware of how he didn’t feel the same excitement and vitality he used to when he would fantasize about finding it. In fact, all he felt, really, was the weight of presence this book had accumulated in this house. He felt the lie of omission in the leather cover every time he touched it, and every time he looked at Stan, he thought about Journal 1, like it was some kind of dirty addiction or secret love affair that his uncle would rather take to his grave than confess to his niece and nephew. That lie ruined the adventure. As if there weren’t a million other things about this situation that hadn’t already done the job. 

Sometimes he hated thinking. If Mabel were here she could take his mind off of it all, but she was his only hope of that happening, because she was the only way it could happen. He hated thinking, but he couldn’t stop the flood of information that was always being fed into his conscious being like a sewer line. The way his brain worked it didn’t even stop when he was asleep. He just had dreams about whatever was bothering him, and chances are, if it was bothering him that much, it was a horrible dream. Ironically to Dipper, with as much as he’s been worrying about Bill as of now, he still has not managed to control the things his mind shows him when he’s asleep.

He took a few shaky steps up to the screen door. It took awhile for him to commit to actually opening it.

“Ford?”

“Hm?”

“Sorry. I ––” His voice was getting so quiet he might as well be whispering. “Do you want something to drink––”

“Sit down, Dipper. We can talk about the journals.”

He stepped outside and sat down, more like a machine than anything else. It annoyed him that he was making himself so small, but he couldn’t help it; it was an instinct, and God knows that survival in Gravity Falls meant that you should trust whatever instincts you have left. 

“So,” Dipper cleared his throat and raised his voice a little, “so, what do you feel like… talking about?”

Ford exhaled. “You choose.”

“The, um.” He cleared his throat, mumbling to himself before talking. “Topics, topics––what about the shapeshifter? W-what’s the story on that?”

“Oh, that thing. I apologize for him.”

“Why? It’s in his nature to destroy things, isn’t it? He’s one of the things from the forest, I thought.”

“Yes, but I thought I could change that, Dipper, and I failed. He terrorized your sister. She didn’t even want to talk to me about it when she got to the end of what happened. What could have possibly happened after putting him in a cryo-chamber? What made her so terrified?” Ford looked into the rafters of the rotting porch. Pensive, that’s the word, thought Dipper.

“It’s whatever, really.”

“It isn’t.” He took a swig from a soda can out of his pocket and looked at Journal 1, as if he expected it to leap out of Dipper’s lap and bare teeth. As if he would be ready to fight and kill it if it did. “It isn’t. I wish I had never written those journals.”

“What!”

“It’s not even a journal to me at this point. It’s a trap, Dipper. A list of a thousand ways to die. That’s all it is. These journals have meant nothing but near death experiences for you and Mabel and I hate thinking about it.”

“Then don’t think about it!”

“I think you and I both know how it goes when we try to stop thinking.” The woodpeckers ate at the house; Ford was hesitating. “This summer was supposed to be fun for you. An escape, I think, is how Lee put it. Your parents were so excited for you to meet him. Me.” Swig. “Us, I guess.”

There was a pause, and a rustle in the trees––another secret whispered, run, and bellowed. The sky bore down in an unnatural blue that Oregon was not used to seeing. There were no clouds. Ford kept staring at that journal and could not stop thinking about how responsible he could be for pre-teenage deaths, just as Dipper stared at the sky and could not stop thinking about, well, anything in particular. He wanted to tell Ford that he was having fun, but couldn’t figure out the disclaimer for all the near-death experiences without making him feel bad. Besides, he didn’t want to lie. At this point, this summer was becoming more stressful than exciting to him. He was losing more sleep than he ever thought he would be at twelve years old and Dipper would be damned if supernatural occurrences and dream demons were the things he had to tell his parents were the cause for his sudden development of insomnia. Or, even worse, he could tell them it was Grunkle Stan’s fault, and then he would never see this place again, which only made him think about the fact that despite all the shit this town had put him through, at his age nonetheless, no doubt resulting in some serious psychological problems down the line, he didn’t want to think of the prospect of never coming back here again. Despite the wildlife, he didn’t want to leave these forests behind. Despite the Dusk 2 Dawn and Robbie and all the horrible things that she reminded him of, Dipper hated the idea of never seeing Wendy again. It tore him apart knowing what kind of Phantom of the Opera crap was going down with him and the sleepy township of Gravity Falls. And it made him afraid knowing that he didn’t even want to run away from the things that go bump in the night. It was unfathomable. 

If his grandfather had heard how Dipper inherited his brilliant great uncle’s brilliant brain he would not have understood what kind of a curse it was, what kind of hell they went through having the brain that wouldn’t shut up since it learned how to convey words, images and ideas to conscious and sentient organic matter. 

The shapeshifter, Dipper thought. A nice change of subject. Why does it choose to look as ugly as it did in its true form? Do shapeshifters know how to convince themselves of lies? Could it ever someday choose a new true form and say to itself, “This is me”? How does it think? he wondered. How do thoughts and ideas travel through a brain that is constantly changing shape and size, or is it constant in every form it takes? Dipper wondered to himself while fidgeting with the pages of the journal. He didn’t want to open it while Ford was staring at it like that, force him to look at the pages that he wrote thirty years ago, when he genuinely thought that they would help the people of Earth by documenting all this arcane nonsense. Where is Mabel? Why isn’t she back yet? What is she doing? Does she ever think this much? Does her brain get so carried away with wondering things that it wonders what it’s wondering? Does it ever think about the concept of wondering itself and how thinking about thinking about the concept of wondering is so many inversions of cells considering their own function and the function of the effects one of those functions could have? Does she ever think about how convoluted the human brain and consciousness become when they work in tandem? Dipper looked down from the creepy blue of the Oregon horizon and saw that he was flipping through the book now, showing broadly the articles and the drawings. Ford had looked away.

He landed on one of the spreads about the dream demon, Bill Cipher. It didn’t call him Bill quite yet, since only the third and final journal put a name to the yellow eyesore, but the information it had on him was extremely contradictory to everything he had gathered about Bill so far. Nothing was negative, and nothing was in code. 

Ford cleared his throat loudly. “Dipper, didn’t you come out here to pick my brain?”

Looking down at that page Dipper finally remembered who was pressing on his mind the most as of late, in more ways than one, and he remembered how much he wanted to know about this thing, this demon creature. “Uh. Bill Cipher?”

Ford held his breath, and muttered so quietly that Dipper could barely tell that he spoke, “ _Bill._ ”

“Demon?”

“We’re familiar,” he whispered. “Why do you ask about Bill Cipher, Dipper?”

“I just want to know how he works, I guess. I mean, dream demon?”

A chuckle. Dipper tried again. “You don’t have anything negative about Bill in journals one or two, but in number three you just––lose it. There’s blood on the pages. It’s almost like you didn’t know that he was evil when you first started writing about him?”

Ford tensed, and Dipper could hear the shift of leather to his left. “Yes. I did think that he was trustworthy, but that changed quickly. You would know what I mean if you’ve met him.” 

Dipper laughed. “Oh, we have, he––” He swallowed and dipped his voice as it cracked. “He’s pretty intense.”

Silence.

“He, uh,” Dipper’s voice cracked horribly. “He got me one night. It was p-pretty scary, heh. I was a spirit for awhile while he used my body to get the journal.”

Ford seemed to choke on something he was about to say. 

“T-the journal. Yeah, he got his hands on it because my sister was using it as a prop in her play that she was using to seduce some puppet freak.” He tugged at his collar. “That–that doesn’t matter. Sorry. I mean, Mabel could tell it wasn’t me, so she did well enough getting it back––”

“Oh, Dipper. The journal. My journal?”

“Yeah. For a second.”

“Dear God.” Ford leaned back on the bench with a creak, thumbs covering his eyes and mouth a thin line. “Oh God. Dear God. Thank goodness for Mabel, then.” 

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Dipper nervously chuckled. He cleared his throat. “The first thing he did in my body was destroy Fiddleford’s computer.” He heard Ford’s breath catch. “And then he went around the shack inflicting pain on him––uh, my? Self? I couldn’t feel anything until much later. I was really sleep-deprived because I had wanted to get the passcode to the computer. Which, I guess, was a pretty stupid dream.” His voice trailed off to nothingness.

“That’s how he must have gotten you, then. If you were tired.”

Dipper froze. “Wait. What do you mean?”

“That’s how he works, Dipper. You were tired, so he probably gave you a dream.”

“It––wasn’t a dream, Ford. Mabel was there. He was in my body.”

“Well, I’m not disputing that fact. But, you must remember, Dipper. Bill is a dream demon. He has no power in the physical realm. No body, no form at all to affect this place. He needs a vessel to get anything done, but he can’t get one without someone allowing him to enter their body in a formal agreement, sealed with a handshake.” Ford opened his eyes. “You were tired, so he made you think that you had no choice but to make a deal with him to get something he made you think you need.” He glanced over. “That is how he gets you.”

In that moment, Dipper’s blood went cold. 

“So it was m-my fault then? He g-got to me because I was so––I was so exhausted, I––” His hands flew to his face. “There was no p-password limit, there was no self-destruct––”

“Oh, oh no, Dipper, Dipper no.” Ford took the boy’s wrists and shook them, trying to think of what to say to him. “There was no way you could have avoided it. Dipper, there was nothing you could have done!”

“I could have g-gone to sleep, Ford! I could have l-listened to M-Mabel!” He was starting to shake. Sleep. She told him to go to sleep. Why didn’t he listen? Why didn’t he ever listen?

Ford just stared into his face, saying nothing, not letting go of the tiny wrists he had picked from Dipper’s face to see the watery eyes of a twelve-year-old right as it all came crashing down, and, not for the first time in his life, Ford knew that he had done this young and innocent child wrong in a way that was not easily fixable, and in a way that he would most definitely pay for later. After he had promised Stan, after he had promised _himself_ that Dipper and Mabel could not be harmed by him, how could he do _this_?

Dipper got up from the bench, with a determined hand on the armrest so that it at least looked like he was committed to the way he moved his body. As he climbed the stairs and heard the screen door scream open he dashed right up the stairs as if Ford seeing him was going to mean death––the weirdest anxiety he ever felt, and he didn’t stop running until he got into the attic and closed the door quietly behind him, fingers shaking and teeth chattering. He mouthed the word “why” depravedly in the mirror, and flopped down on the bed, staring at the ceiling as he was prone to do when there was no better activity around. 

The air began to crackle. Oh god. He was sleepy. 

He couldn’t go to sleep. He must not go to sleep. He bolted up, hitting his head on the bedside table, reminding him of Bill Cipher stabbing, slamming, torturing his body, laughing and laughing and laughing like it was all some kind of joke (because it was). 

“ ** _PAIN IS HILARIOUS!_** ”

He teared up when he realized how clearly he could hear that voice inside his head, mocking him, tearing him up like nobody’s business at all. Out of everything he had seen and heard this summer, he thought, there was nothing in this world that would better make him want to cry. 

+++++++++++++++++

Stanley pulled into the driveway with Mabel in the backseat, listening to the oldies station with such a subdued silence that he could have sworn that she had gotten out of the car at one of the two red lights in Gravity Falls. Unfortunately for Stan the thick atmosphere of awkwardness coagulating in the humidity was a constant assurance that Mabel was still inside. 

“So, Mabel!” he announced into the rearview mirror. “How was the sleepover?”

“Oh, it was fine,” she said resignedly.

“Any boys come over? Eh?”

His joke elicited a giggle, which lightened the mood just a tad. “Come on, Grunkle Stan, don’t be gross!” She tossed her hair and narrowed her eyes with a smile. “Although I won’t deny that there weren’t any boys who _wished_ they were there.”

He laughed, but he could tell that she wasn’t really there. Mabel, the Mabel that he loved so much despite her energy and gusto, was broken. He knew why, of course. Oh, this was going to be hard to fix. 

They pulled into the driveway and Stan yelled at the goat for jumping in front of the car, as usual. Ford was on the porch (he looked so tired), and when Stan pulled in he stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, looking mutely at his brother before putting on a smile for Mabel, who had gotten out of the car and tiptoed around to the trunk. She didn't even ask Stan to help with her bags like a chauffeur. Stan couldn’t help but wonder if she was doing this on purpose.

“Fun sleepover, Mabel?”

“Yeah!” she said, absent and a little strained as she hoisted her bags up the stairs. 

“Would you like some help?”

“No thanks, I’ve got it.” A door closed quietly upstairs. Stan was still in the car.

“An uneventful drive home, I see.”

“Don’t pin this all on me, Ford,” Stan said as he got out of the car. “This is on you, too.”

“You are being so abrasive, Lee.” Ford jogged lightly down the steps and back to the trunk to grab some of the groceries that Stan had picked up. “I wasn’t trying to pin it on you.”

“Good.” Stan looked around and sniffed. “Where’s Dipper?” He considered calling him down to get the groceries until it occurred to him how odd it was that he hadn’t already come down to greet Mabel. Or that he wasn’t already out here waiting, or talking to the Author like he had been gushing about doing pretty much the whole summer. There must be something up. “He, uh. Is he O.K.?”

“He’s dealing with some things. We talked.”

“Oh, that was smart, genius,” Stan laughed. “What, did you tell him the journals were fake or something? I thought we talked about this, Ford.”

“I told him I wished I hadn’t written them.”

“Oy _vey_.”

“That’s not what he’s upset about, Lee. I –– I think we should leave him alone. He’s distraught, really distraught, I think I may have really done some damage.”

“You and I both, brother.”

They marched inside with the bags. Ford expressed his disgust at the switch to plastic. Stan glanced over to the television like he expected the twins to be sitting there watching it, like he expected them to look over and complain about the lack of fresh vegetables and the sheer amount of cans he always bought, like nothing had ever happened. It was a pipe dream, but it felt heavy, made of metal, pressing down on his shoulders and preventing him from breathing when he needed to. He took out the instant mac ’n cheese and some canned broccoli and started some water on the stove in a tall pan. Ford was at the kitchen table with an apple and a knife, slicing pieces and eating them. 

“What did you and Dipper talk about?”

“What did you and Mabel talk about?” Ford picked off a piece of the fruit and chewed it, slowly.

Stan grumbled. You have to pick your battles, he guessed. “The most she ever said was that the sleepover was fun and there were no boys. We were listening to the oldies station for crying out loud, and she didn’t make me switch to that weird techno music she’s always raving about.”

“They get quiet when they’re upset, I guess.”

“Complete opposite of you.”

“Speak for yourself, brother. I’m civil.”

Stan snorted. “Rich. What did he ask you about, then?”

“He asked me about a demon named Bill Cipher.”

“Cipher?” Stan was confused. “Is he that triangle guy? You didn’t give him a name in Journal 1.” 

“That’s him.”

“What about him, then? He sounds like a nice enough guy the way you talked about him. You were all, ‘ _Gentleman._ ’ ‘ _Snappy dresser_.’ Sounded like a fruitcake to me! _That’s_ who Dipper was worried about?”

Ford sneered at his brother's obnoxious air quotes. “He wasn’t who I thought he was when I wrote Journal 1, Lee. He’s evil. And Dipper just found out it was his fault that he lost some major headway on his mystery mission.” Ford threw up his hands. “We lost a lot because of him too, Stanley. We lost Fiddleford’s computer. That had some major information on it. We needed that computer, Lee!”

“I don’t care about any computer! What do you mean it was Dipper’s fault? He never told me about any dream demon!”

“He was possessed, Lee! You don’t know that your own nephew was possessed? He took over Dipper’s body during some show!” He picked off a piece of the apple’s skin. “A play to seduce a puppet guy? I think?”

“Oh man, Mabel’s sock opera. Jeez, that was one weird night. Pyrotechnics and Mabel, bad idea from the start. I guess that was why it all went haywire.”

“He had the journal. For a split second, but he had it _in his hands_ , and now that he knows that he can get it from these children he isn’t going to stop until they give it up. They’re weak and he knows it.” He gestured his knife hand at Stan. “You don’t know what he could have done if he had one of my books, Lee. What he could do. He’s much too powerful for us to let him get his hands on even one.” Ford threw his hands up. “You didn’t even know he was possessed. Your own nephew.”

“Oh, pardon me if my _great_ -nephew never told me he was possessed by a demon!” Stan spat. “Truth be told, I wouldn’t tell me either! I’ve had to pretend not to believe him when he told me about supernatural whatnots for how long, now? And all because of you, Ford, the family fucking genius! This could have all been prevented if it wasn’t for you and your research!”

“I know that, Lee!” Ford stood up. Behind him the chair toppled over, and he held the apple in his hand like it was a weapon. “I know what I did! I wish those journals didn’t exist! I wish I had never come to Gravity Falls!”

Stan was defensive. They were face to face now, and Ford had not put down his knife.

“This town would be much better off if it weren’t for the Pines twins, now wouldn’t it?” Ford continued, his eyes boring into Stan’s like drill bits in a knot of wood. “You think I don’t regret that research? You think I don’t regret _everything_? Really, Lee?”

They heard a faint _“Mabel!”_ and then two pairs of feet running up the stairs. Ford gingerly picked the chair up from the floor and sat back down in it, Stan sitting across from him. Everything was wrong about what was happening here. Stan was three feet from the phone on the wall right now. If he wanted to, he could call the Pines right now and tell them that their son and daughter were on the next bus back home. 

But he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep Dipper and Mabel, despite all the danger they were in right now. Even now, he couldn’t convince himself to see the problems with what he was doing enough to save his family from it, and the possibility that he never will scared him more than any dream demon possessing his great-nephew. 

He willed himself to go and get the remote to turn on the TV. Get whatever background noise he could before it was too late for it to be effective enough. What was on just made him turn it right back off again––the Gravity Falls news channel, reporting on what seemed to be some sudden and strangely vertical earthquakes just a few days before. He didn’t want to see shots of the houses and the diner. He didn’t want to see the Dusk 2 Dawn, leveled where it stood from years of rot and neglect turning its walls and roof weak. He didn’t want to see the Corduroys, fuming at Mother Nature for destroying their log piles and making weeks and weeks of work for naught. He didn’t want to see Soos on the air, sweating under the pressure of the lie as his grandmother talked to the anchors about how none of the lights in her house worked anymore thanks to the cables breaking. Ford didn’t look up from his study of the vinyl on the kitchen table, and Stan just walked off to the shop to send Wendy up to help Dipper and Mabel and count the profits himself.


	2. Distractions and their Resulting Turmoil

“Hi, Dipper.” Mabel tossed all of her sleepover gear onto her bed and slid down onto the floor where her droopy-eyed brother had set up camp with Journal 2 and a cup of instant coffee which he was sipping at resignedly. She looked at the mug. “Gross.”

“Disgusting.” He took another cautious sip and shuddered as the bitter taste made its merry way across his tongue and left him gagging. “I hate coffee so much.”

“Why are you drinking it, then?” Mabel peeked under his hat. Oh, she knew. “Did you sleep last night, Dipper? You better say yes!” She pointed her finger at him. “And you better not lie to me!”

“Okay, okay, I stayed up,” he confessed, hands up. 

“Dipper!”

“I’m sorry, okay! I just really wanted to read the other journals for so long and now I finally got to. I just––“ He sighed. 

“Spit it out, Dipdop.”

“I’m kind of… _disappointed_. I mean, it wasn’t as fun as I thought I would be. Reading the new journals, I mean. It just feels like work. And it’s stressful, because now that I know all this stuff, I can’t deny its existence anymore. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah.” She scooted next to him and peeked at the page he was on. At the top, it read “Summoning” in big, loopy lettering. “Bill?”

“Yep." He thought about telling her about his possession. How it had only happened because he didn't listen to her when she told him to get some rest. How it was all his fault because he was trying to achieve an ambition he knew was much too steep. He could feel sobs threatening his throat, and he knew that he would only break down if he forced himself to admit twice in one day that one did not have to be very smart to trick Dipper Pines and gain access to some of the most powerful tomes of knowledge in the universe. He thought that this may very well be the first problem that Mabel would not be able to help solve; that said, he didn't think that he was going to be able to solve it, either. This was nobody's expertise. This was uncharted territory. He looked over and she was making a disgusted face at the pages below her. 

"Man, what a creep." She leaned down closer. "Why doesn't he say how evil he is next to the _summoning_ page?"

Dipper scratched the page with his finger, smudging some of the ink. “I guess. Mabel?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you ever feel like we’re in over our heads? Like, not just us, but the Stans too?”

Mabel looked down and brushed her bangs to the side. She had been thinking about this all night while Candy and Grenda were sleeping, ever since Stanford and Stanley were reunited, and they began fighting immediately. In fact, she began thinking this when she saw Dipper at her sock opera. The night it finally occurred to her that Bill might actually be unstoppable.

But she couldn’t say that, could she?

“Dipper, I don’t think we should worry about them.” She looked up when she heard the front door close. “I do think we should help with dinner, though.” She nudged Dipper. “Whaddaya say? Get some quality family time with the new Grunkle Stan?”

Although he knew that this had little chances of being any better than the last “family time” he had with Ford, he thought that it would be a good distraction anyway. “Wanna bet we’re having mac ’n cheese again?”

Mabel giggled. “You don’t have to bet money on Stan being cheap, Dipper.”

Dipper slid the book underneath his mattress out of habit before following his sister out of the attic and down the stairs to where she was sitting at the bottom step. She was peeking her head around the corner. She was listening, and the look in her eyes was less than pleased with what she heard. 

“They’re fighting, Dipper. Look at them,” she said.

In a moment she whipped her head over to him––she just looked at him with the most horrified expression––before she dashed past him back up the stairs. “Mabel!” he called as he followed suit, all the way up back to the bedroom where they had started. She was in the corner engulfed in her sweater, rocking gently and breathing heavily. “Mabel, what is it? What, did they say something?”

She didn’t move from her sweater. “They were yelling, Dipper! They just keep fighting! You know I hate when our family fights!” She paused, and mumbled so quietly dipper barely heard. “And Stan was cursing this time.”

He collapsed onto his knees next to her, not sure what to do with his hands. Hug her? Was she in the mood to be hugged? “Mabel, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad! Grownups fight sometimes. I mean, right?” Cursing. He’d never heard Stan curse before. Realizing that it was befitting of his character was painful. 

“Ford said that Gravity Falls would be better off without the Pines twins. They all hate us. I know they do. They hate Stan, and they hate the Mystery Shack. Gravity Falls _would_ be better off without us.”

Dipper almost had nothing to say to that. It was true––if Ford had never made his base with Fiddleford in Gravity Falls, nothing paranormal would happen. There would be no need for the Blind Eye Society. There would be no portal, no earthquakes, no Mystery Shack, no Gideon or Bill or any of it. Gravity Falls would be a normal sleepy small town like it was meant to be. He hated lying to her. “He didn’t mean us, Mabel! People like us here! What about Candy and Grenda? And Pacifica? I guess?”

“Yeah, but a family is a package deal, Dipper. We’re related to the two most hated people in this place. We can’t just be consoled because we think we’re better than them. They're our family!” She was shaking. “And I don’t want to fight with you. I know that grownups fight, but I don’t want to fight with you.”

“We aren’t fighting!” Dipper thought about it. “… Are we?”

Mabel sniffed. “Not right now, no.” She poked her head out of the top of her sweater and leaned it back against the bedframe. “But one day we might. And we might start yelling at each other like Ford and Stan are. They used to be friends, but does that just go away when you grow up?” 

While Dipper wasn’t normally comfortable with making promises, he found the concept painful. Not being friends with Mabel? It was so hard to be mad at her. It was even harder to have her be mad at you. “Mabel, I’ll always love you. You’re my sister. I have to.” He scooted next to her and leaned on her head. “I’m not going to just stop loving my sister because I’m old. Besides,” he said, smiling, “then I won’t get to make fun of you when _you’re_ old.”

She laughed. “We’re the same age, dummy.”

“I’m still gonna make fun of you.” Dipper paused. “Besides, I’m technically ––“

“What _ever_ , Dipper. Three minutes doesn’t make a difference.”

“Not to you, dumdum.”

Downstairs he heard the television flip on and the news blare out for a split second before turning back off again, and footsteps going back to the shop where Wendy was no doubt blowing off work. He heard someone coming upstairs, then a knock on the door, and when it opened there was Wendy.

“Hey, guys.” She looked around the room. “Whoa, so this is the Pines residence! Nice room, dudes. I like the posters.”

“Hey, Wendy,” Mabel said. Dipper was surprised when he didn’t blush as she sat down in front of them.

“Yikes. You two look a little down. Rough day?”

“Kinda.” 

“Well, if it’s any consolation, there was literally nobody in the shack today. Total ghost town. I’m starting to wonder why I even came in today.” She scratched her head. “At least it was quiet so I could read some stuff and text in peace. How was your sleepover, Mabel?”

“It was good.” 

Wendy raised her eyebrows. “Are there… details?”

“Well, Grenda was staying at Candy’s anyways because her house caught fire.”

Wendy looked struck. “Oh.”

“But it was cool. We stayed up until like three in the morning watching some really trashy movies on Candy’s computer.” She stuck her nails out, which were such bright and clashing colors that Dipper was afraid of getting a headache looking at them. “And we did nail art!”

“Those are so awesome, dude,” Wendy said as she admired the handiwork. “Hey, you guys busy? I was gonna drop by Toby’s and ask him questions about fake politics, but I need your imaginations.”

A distraction! Yes! “Well, I’m up for it if you are, Mabel!”

“Are you kidding me?” She shot out of her sweater. “This is my calling! I can finally make up titles and laws that sound official and be of real use to this country! This is urgent business, Sergeant-General of the National Buffalo Pastures Dipper!”

“Lieutenant-Senator Mabel, I’ll have you know that it’s _bison_!”

“See, you guys are helping me out already!” Wendy whipped out her phone and rapidly tapped out a message to who-knows-who. “Okay, Thompson is going to get here any second with the van. I’m telling him that the Pines twins are coming to make things fun.”

That made Dipper blush just a little. He never thought he would be grateful to have a crush on Wendy, although he wished it were a little better at taking his mind off of things more effectively. 

It took three minutes for Thompson and the rest of the cool teenagers to come speeding around to the front of the house, and Dipper, Mabel and Wendy squeezed happily inside. The music was loud, the van reeked of rotting food and Tambry and Robbie were sitting awfully close together even before they loaded up––to Dipper, it was a heaven send. The door slammed shut and before long they were speeding once again off to the fake newspaper where Toby lived and worked in hopes of gaining the approval of a real news center. 

On the way Wendy chatted briefly with Tambry and Robbie about the earthquakes. Robbie’s parents’ business was booming, and Tambry’s apartment complex was being evacuated because of the fatal cracks in some of the buildings, but neither of them seemed terribly bothered about it. Dipper looked over at Mabel and she was looking out the window, not engaging at all. Everything was wrong. And it made Dipper want to throw up. 

He didn’t feel present as they were questioning Toby about Russia’s recent decision to unite with the USA and form one big super-country or the President’s new daughter who turned out to have six feet and an extra arm protruding from her chest, even when he was asking the questions. The distraction wasn’t working for him. And when he heard Mabel stuttering from time to time like she used to in the third grade he almost thought that it wasn’t working for her either. But neither that fact nor the fact that nothing could deter his brain from thinking about the mess that was waiting for them at that house was more aggravating to him than the fact that everyone else was… _fine_.

Tambry was texting and whispering to Robbie about mutual friends that he neither knew nor particularly cared about. Robbie was looking over her shoulder and giggling with her about whatever gossip she was channeling through her cell at that very moment. Wendy was having a great time teasing Toby, and Thompson was looking around for something ridiculous to do for fifty cents because he wasn’t very good at insults but he still wanted to be a part of the fun. It was as if there were no earthquakes, no huge flash of blue light that knocked out the power for a good five hours in the wee daylight of morn. It was as if nothing had affected any of them in their personal lives. It was as if nothing had happened. 

Everyone else was _completely fine_.

It was driving Dipper crazy. 

On the van ride home they stopped at the only McDonald’s in the area, which was not actually on the way home. It was an hour and a half out of the way, which only allowed Dipper to marinate in his own confusion for that much longer, not talking, not making eye contact. If anything he sometimes looked at Mabel at the same time she looked at him, and then they both looked out the window together, true Mystery Twins in that it was a mystery to everyone in that car what their home life was like. Nobody besides maybe Wendy could possibly know what was happening in the Mystery Shack, and if Wendy did know something, she sure as hell wasn’t about to give it up. To Dipper, it seemed like the only difference between what a mystery was to those teenagers and what a mystery was to him was that it didn’t occur to them to investigate. That, or they didn’t care to find out, and thinking about the sheer capacity this group had for not caring about him or his sister made him feel sick to his stomach. 

At the McDonald’s he and Mabel sat close together on the inside of the booth as the rest of them were laughing about some joke or another, inside jokes, some of which they were there for but couldn’t bring themselves out of the mire of questions that they both had festering in their minds thanks to the Stans and their constant rivalry. Dipper got an Oreo McFlurry and Mabel got M&M, both on Wendy’s tab, and they sipped on them, listening to the conversations going on around them, Mabel interjecting every now and then with a somewhat strained pun or zinger of some sort. Eventually she laid her head down on his shoulder and he did the same on top of her head. 

“Dipper, you have to talk to me after this, ok?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he whispered back. 

Neither of them really did notice when Wendy looked over; neither of them noticed how lulls in the conversation would be there because it was usually when one of them spoke up. The car ride home was stale, to say the least. At most, it was an opportunity for everyone to realize how small the Pines Twins’ world could get––in times of disaster or distress, it could shrink down to almost nothing, until there was barely room for the two of them alone.


	3. Catalyst of Self-Deception

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Tara for letting me know about the whole chapter three issue--apparently it was just a repost of chapter 1! I don't even know how that would happen. Thanks for reading, please keep commenting with problems etc.!

“Stan, there is something seriously wrong with Mabel and Dipper,” Wendy mumbled. Stan had just walked in with a box of stock and left it on the counter.

He didn’t know where to look, so he grunted something about working and payroll and walked out.

The night before on the ride home they would barely make eye contact with each other, let alone anyone else in the van. Afterward she talked with the crew about it and they all felt it too––that they just weren’t registering that they were non-present, or maybe that they just didn’t really want to be there. She had assured them that in the morning she would go to work early and see if she could talk to Stan about it, and although she felt guilty coming back to them with nothing, at least she didn’t have to say she didn’t do it. 

Her phone jumped on the counter. She picked it up and Tambry’s face was bright on the screen next to a text.

 _all good?_ she asked, with a thumbs up and a frowny emoji.

 _nope,_ Wendy replied. _nothin outa stan >:/_

_well u tried :/_

_ima keep on bc this is some crap going down_

_k, call u later?_

_cool w me_

She set the phone back on the counter and leaned back in her chair, but suddenly she just felt restless. She needed to do something. She picked up the broom and started around the cash register, as wrong as it felt to be doing the work that she was being paid for instead of blowing it off as usual. She had a good twenty minutes to herself before someone was bound to walk in. Ford, Stan, if she was lucky maybe Dipper or Mabel would come in and they could chat a little. No Soos, since he was helping his grandmother fix the electrical, but he wasn’t much of a conversation anyway. 

Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a blue hat make its way into the shop with a can of soda and one of those weird journals this family seemed to always have around. “Dipper!” she called to him. He looked up and smiled.

“Hey, Wendy, you’re doing _work_?”

She laughed. “Yeah, I know. Don’t tell Stan or he might fire me for sudden mood swings or something.” 

“Hah!”

“Dipper,” she started, setting the broom back behind the counter, “yesterday you and Mabel seemed really upset about something.” She sat down on the stool in front of the register. “Is everything okay?”

Dipper looked at her, and then at his journal, making nervous sounds. His nose itched, but his hands were full. Crap. “It’s… weird, Wendy. Everything’s all upside down and Mabel and I aren’t taking it that well.”

“What’s going on, Dipper?”

He went over and set his things down on the counter with a soft thud, opting to stand next to where she was stooled. He scratched his nose, half for relief and half out of nervousness. “The Stans keep fighting. I guess that just kind of hits home for us, yknow? They were really good friends when they were young but now they’re just really mad at each other all the time. And I guess we were just both so excited to meet the new Stan, we didn’t expect it to be this hostile.” He furrowed his brow. “Or maybe that part was just me.”

“Well, that’s just how grownups are, man. They fight.” She blew her bangs up. “I mean, my dad picks fights with people pretty much all the time.”

Dipper chuckled. “But the Stans are twins! And it’s kind of sad to think about ever hating Mabel. The one person who’s been on my side for my whole life.” He paused. “And it’s not just that, I guess. Everything’s just kind of happening. And no one seems as scared about it as me.”

“Like, how do you mean?”

“Everything that’s happened, Wendy! I never thought about how dangerous it all is! You almost died, don’t you remember?” His hands were shaking, just a little. “I just––I’m realizing how helpless I would be if any of these creatures decided that they really wanted to kill me, or Mabel. Or anybody I care about! I mean, I'm twelve!”

She stared straight ahead. She did not like thinking back to the shapeshifter. She remembered what it was like looking at herself and seeing evil, watching Dipper sink an axe into her form, the mixed emotions she felt about watching this not-really version of herself so mortally injured. Not only that; knowing that somewhere underneath the forest where her father and brothers work every day there is a Dipper, face frozen in sheer blood-curdling terror––it was all too much. And she could only imagine what it was like for Dipper, watching himself die. Kind of. 

“Don’t worry about it, Dipper,” she told him with a light slap on the back of the head. “Nothing's gonna kill you. I mean, worst case scenario, you get a really bad bug bite.”

That elicited a laugh at least. Of course it bugged her that she couldn’t get the response from him that she normally did. He wasn’t facing her and laughing at everything she said. He wasn’t darting his eyes around the room; he was focusing religiously, almost desperately, on a snow globe across the room that held the Mystery Shack and a little figurine of Sascrotch. His cheeks did not have the ruddiness they normally did on a weekday like this; instead, they were pale and his eyes had the puffiness of a teenager skipping sleep. He was afraid of something and she couldn’t possibly know what it was or how afraid he felt. 

“Do you wanna help me out with this inventory?” she interjected, gesturing over to the boxes that Stan had left on her counter. He smiled, hopped onto the stool as Wendy got up, and peeked inside. 

“‘Half-size black and white posters?’" He picked one up out of the box and unrolled it. "These are just pictures of Stan in black and white on plain paper with shiny tape on them!” He peeked into the other box. “And… off-brand energy drinks?” 

“I know, right?” She handed him a box of posters and laughed when he pretended not to struggle. “Careful with that.”

He grunted as he set it on the floor with a thump. “Is there a display in here?”

She dropped the t-shirts next to the shelf that she had cleared for their arrival that morning. “Stan said there would be. I think there’s supposed to be instructions too.”

Rooting through the box, he made a disappointed sound. “There’s a display, but no instructions!” He straightened out and stretched his arms, sighing heavily. “We’ll just have to figure it out, then.”

“Sweet, puzzles!” She traipsed over to the box where Dipper stood with hands on hips. “Ready when you are, man.”

He beamed. A little more ease this time. Thank goodness. 

+++++++++

There was little actual conversation while they assembled the display, as it was pretty easy and all they needed was some stronger glue. Dipper got up to get the hot glue gun from Stan, as he kept it locked away in a safebox somewhere for “security reasons,” which was when Wendy’s phone buzzed. Tambry was calling. She figured she had some time for it. 

“Hey, Tam. Not much break time. What’s up?”

“Did you talk to those twins?”

“Just Dipper,” she reported. “It’s, like, half family problems. Stan’s fighting with his twin brother and it’s kind of hitting home for them.”

“Oh, shit, that sucks.” She took a breath before starting again, surprised this time. “Wait, there’s another guy at the Mystery Shack? What, did he just show up?”

“I don’t know, Tam! I guess he came in some back way or something.”

“Well, what does his car look like then?”

She peeked between the drapes of the window. “I… don’t see another car,” she answered slowly.

“No car, huh?” she asked. “Then how in the hell did he show up? There’s something fishy about this guy, Wendy. I don’t like him.”

“Yeah, well you don’t like many people, Tambry,” Wendy joked, making Tambry laugh a little. “I know what you mean though.”

“You know, I’m catching wind of some drama in the Pines household, Wendy. Like federal crime-level drama.”

“Dude, they’re just having sibling problems. That’s not a crime.” Although, the way it was getting to Dipper and Mabel, it may as well be. 

“That’s not what I’m talking about, girl. I mean like identity theft, counterfeiting––I heard he’s even been incarcerated in other countries.”

Wendy frowned. She looked around the room. Suddenly the cameras in the corners of the room looked a lot more menacing. “I mean, I know that Stan’s done some stuff, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“Your boss is pretty shifty, chiquita.”

She glanced over at both the doorways before she cupped her hand over the receiver and lowered her voice. Wendy knew this feeling--suddenly being in the shack made her stomach stir with the kind of anxiety she wished she could ignore. “You know what? We had a raid once. An entire team of suits came and loaded the Shack,” she whispered. “God, I’ve never thought that much of it. I just thought it was, like, a regulation thing.” 

“Yeah, regulation thing, my ass,” Tambry retorted. “Whatever. At least he pays you for doing nothing.”

“Yeah. Bye.”

“Text ya later, babe.”

“Yup.” She ended the call. 

The display so far was looking good, albeit small and cheap and done in patchy black and white. Stan’s face stared back at her on the cardboard, which only made her think about how it would take her weeks of telling herself that it was probably nothing, that there was a logical explanation for those accusations of federal crimes, and that she should probably just leave well enough alone to actually believe it. 

For a second the Blind Eye Society blipped into her head before she dismissed the notion. She did not want to get to that place. The Blind Eye Society was better off not being an option. 

Dipper came back in with the glue gun and she could put it on a back burner, thank Providence. The assembly was not difficult at all once they had all the tools they needed to get it to stay together. It only dawned on her later that that display was directly across from the counter, and she did not want to stare at a caricature of her felon boss for another month and a half. She made a note to set it somewhere by the vending machine tomorrow on her way home.


	4. In Terms of Eve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took longer than expected, I just found out about the mezuzah in the doorway of the Stans' childhood home, so I had to make a couple of tweaks and do research and such! That said, PLEASE let me know if I got something wrong in the faith of Judaism. I tried my best to find the information I needed and I tried to be sparing since my knowledge of the faith is slim to say the least, but I would still like to know if there is something I need to fix!
> 
> Thank you for your kind words--please share this if you like it, it would be much appreciated on my part ;-) enjoy!
> 
> ALSO: I know that the dynamics I have here are definitely wrong now that we know how Dipper and Stanford are taking things (D&D&D), but I think it's best for me to continue the way I was going since it'd be too inconsistent if i were to change it now :0

After he returned to his home Stanford tended to wander. Sometimes he went down to the places Dipper told him the Mystery Shack staff had nearly been killed in. Sometimes he went into his old room, and he almost got angry at Stan for moving #78 before he thought what’s the point, and do we really need another thing to fight about is that what we really need now Stanford. He walked out into the deep forest and gazed at all the things that he thought would help this world, and he didn’t really bother with why he did it. He gazed long at the crystals, the percepshrooms, the gremloblin mother soothing her child when his father wasn’t home yet. He looked for the gnomes and found none, tried to imagine where it was they ran off to and tried to remember the awesome fascination he used to feel when he discovered something and wrote about it. When he went back to his old lab, he stared at the thing which had traumatized the twins for countless nights after they came out of the place, and kind of wanted to destroy it all. Here’s some perspective: in each of our lives we have a moment that is just full of pure self-destructive instinct. We want to destroy everything that our fingers have ever put together and named. We want to demolish anything that has any trace of evidence that we existed. We want to get rid of ourselves, and we know when the moment comes because it is an extremely potent and unmistakeable feeling. When you find it, remember that close to none of us could ever imagine the frustration of Stanford Pines upon returning to Gravity Falls; almost no one could ever understand what he felt upon seeing his experiments not only dusty but vengeful, not only latent but simmering, not only clever but biding their time until one fateful night a little boy just so happened to come hop-skipping along with nothing but a book and his curiousness and boom, there he is folks! Experiment #210: The Shapeshifter. In the case of Stanford, the phrase “self-destructive tendencies” barely begins to describe the hell of emotions that realizing the number and breadth of his mistakes unleashed. Plainly: there are few people who will ever truly empathize with Stanford Pines.

He approached the creature. 

Although he knew the thing in the tube was not the real Dipper, and although he knew better than to believe in what his eyes were showing him, Ford was wholly overcome, not only with dread but with the knowledge that in the exact same way that we would never be able to understand how badly Ford wished he could annihilate this bunker and everything in it, self included, he would never know the depth of the trauma that he had caused Dipper and Mabel Pines. There was no place in his mindscape where he would be able to find a wound as deep as the ones those children bore. There was no place in the universe that could possibly be as cold as they must have felt as they watched the image of only half of a dynamic duo die, screaming, there is no place in any dimension where anyone could possibly understand how real their nightmares have been since they arrived in Gravity Falls. Ford knew that as hard as he might search within himself he would never find any pain as punishing as the one that had been inflicted on the new Pines twins.

Regardless, he tried. 

A couple of sleepless nights he thought he was close. 

In the morning Dipper would glance at the bags under his eyes from beneath the bill of his hat and show his teeth in an acute grin, like he knew some kind of secret that not even Ford knew he was keeping, and then he would walk off with Mabel and join her at the breakfast table where Stan was doing his best to serve them food that tasted good, making conversation, doing Grunkle Stan things. It made Ford happy knowing that Dipper had some kind of normalcy in life, enough to crack a smile every now and then. And that assurance could last him a good long while into the bunker; every day he thought it was feeling just a little bit better until he saw those two conspiring in a corner, eyes shifting to him and back, whispering, trying to soothe each other and failing miserably but being relieved that the other was trying anyway, and then he would remember that he was the reason neither of them were fine here. Every few days it all came crashing down again, every glass hope he would hoist up that they were feeling better just like he was, every fragile little observation that must mean that they’re all healing, together, would come crashing to the floor and shatter into a million pieces, and when he walked back to the bunker to seal the deal the shards of those dreams cut his feet. 

As he paced in front of that frozen monument of broken-ness he remembered when his father would take them to synagogue every so often, whenever things were getting rough and he needed guidance from God. The synagogue was never a place he felt safe by himself but for those few hours it felt like his father towering over him was a good thing. The rabbi would teach from the Torah, they would kneel and pray, and they left quickly so that none of the other servicegoers would see Stanford (that he knew), and then they would go home and he and Stanley would run off like nothing happened. What stuck with him was always the stories in the Torah; he saw how they were treated with such tenderness and respect, which confused him then. Nevertheless he fixated on them at times, sometimes for a couple of days he would think about Moses or the fall of Lucifer, but mostly he would think of creation, Adam and Lilith and Lilith’s children (the demons, the defects, the ones that were just like him), and then Eve and the humans’ fall from grace. Often he would dance around the idea that every mistake in the world can be put into terms of the story of Adam and Eve, and now he wondered if he was the apple or the garden snake, or possibly even Eve herself, but it doesn’t matter much what you are as long as you are dead in the eyes of God.

++++++++++++

As for Mabel Pines, she was just trying her best to forget. 

She went and found where her brother was whispering excitedly, almost squeaking, squirming sometimes as best he could while curled tightly into a ball on the armchair, book in knees and pen in hand. 

“What’s happening?” She flopped down next to where he was scrunched and dropped her head next to his. “Oo, tense shoulders, bromeo.”

He gasped sharply and rapidly clicked the pen he had in his right hand as he violently flipped the page. “Ohmygod, Mabel!” he exclaimed. “Ooooohmygodohmygodohmygod, look!” He jabbed the page with the end of his pen. “It was the dog that took the key to the trainyard, not Bailey!”

She gasped and slapped her forehead. “It all makes sense!”

He laughed. “You haven’t even read this, silly.”

“You don’t know my life, Dipper. Maybe I’m a secret nerd like you! You don’t know what I read.” She flipped her hair into his face, and he tossed it right back over as he kept reading, spitting hairs out of his mouth. 

(This was a better life to her. She was invested in something outside of her that distanced her from her problems. Unlike her brother she refuses to compartmentalize and deal with them in isolation; in fact, she refuses to put her problems anywhere other than outside her mind, because she would much rather pretend they weren’t there than face them, whether she was with someone who could help her with it or not.)

“A secret nerd. Yeah, right!”

She puffed her bangs off her forehead. “So how was journal 1? I saw you reading it yesterday. You finished it already, didn’t you, ya big nerd?”

He looked at her in the corner of his eye. “Yeah, I finished it. Turns out Bill can make a dream seem like real life so you don’t even know he’s manipulating you. Fun, huh?”

“Yikes. Good thing we haven’t seen him in awhile, I guess.”

“Yup.” He shut his book––boof. “Reading the journals backwards is weird.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s like you have to forget what you learned from the ones that came after the one you’re reading last because the one you read last actually came first, and then you have to like. Stack the information somehow, from the one you read last to the one you read first? Or something. It’s confusing me.” He scratched his eye with the pen. “I guess I should just read them again in order.”

“Duh! It took you this long to think of that?”

“Oh, hush.”

Stan shouted for dinner, and Ford was there this time when Dipper and Mabel showed up. Fortunately for all of them nothing was the matter tonight and they were able to eat peacefully, albeit in silence, which was much better than eating in shifts to avoid each other. The first time a family eats together again after the beginning of a fight is always the most crucial of communions from that point on. No words have to be exchanged, and nobody has to make eye contact, though Dipper caught Ford’s eyes once between bites of Spaghetti-O’s, and every now and again the Stans would actually look at each other. Nobody talked, which was better, because any timeline where someone says something at that table on that night ends in flames. While it may have been counted as a failed dinner for most families, here it was a victory.


End file.
